Progress

When it comes to achieving a goal, be guided by this motto: “Anything is progress.” Maybe you can’t wash all the dishes, but you can wash some of them. You can’t paint the whole house, but you can paint some of it. You might not be able to put 3 hours at a time into starting your book, but you can put down an outline or interview one person.

    Whatever your goal, do something to progress toward it, whether household chores, raising children, investing, starting your own business, exercise — anything that leads you toward that dream is progress.

Egg coffee

Ever had Egg Coffee? At first it sounded downright unreal to us. But now that we’ve had it, we’ve made it over and over. However, I haven’t won anyone over to it, though I’m winning more and more people over to home-roasting their own coffee.*

It’s a terrific way to add some substance to your coffee, and if you add even more to the basic recipe it can be a combination of coffee and breakfast.

The simplest recipe is simply 2 eggs** blended with coffee.

Take 2 whole eggs and crack them into a blender. Make your coffee. When the coffee is ready, pour it into the blender with the eggs and blend them. Voilá! Egg Coffee!

If you want to add some pizzazz to it, even make it breakfast, then here’s what we like to do. Just blend all of the ingredients below, except the coffee, and leave in the blender until you’re ready to put in the coffee.*** Because the coffee cooks the eggs a little, I make sure that I pour some coffee in and blend right away; this prevents any congealing.

Per Person

2 whole eggs
1 tsp honey
1 TBSP Carob powder
1/4 cup Whipping Cream
Pinch of Cinnamon
1 cup of coffee (6 oz.)

While your coffee is cooking, an added bonus is to get some whipped cream ready to place on top; you can save the cinnamon to put on top of the whipping cream.You can also get some large-crystal salt to sprinkle on top.

If you use all organic ingredients, then you’ve got a very healthy treat!

*NOTE: I HIGHLY recommend roasting your own coffee – just look up “home roasting coffee.” This allows for Flexibility, Flavor, Freshness and Fun. I get my beans from Sweet Maria’s (www.sweetmarias.com) and I roast them using an air popcorn popper.

**NOTE: The eggs need to be organic/natural/real. This is because the eggs are raw and only slightly “cooked” in the coffee. Just like many sites will tell you, if you eat raw eggs, then use organic…the typical white ones you buy can’t be trusted when raw.

***NOTE: When making coffee, think of it as “cooking,” because that’s what you’re really doing. “Cook (verb): to prepare for eating, especially by using heat.”

“Roughhousing with Your Kids” — great article from Art of Manliness

http://artofmanliness.com/2012/02/07/the-importance-of-roughhousing-with-your-kids/ 

The Art of Manliness — http://artofmanliness.com/ — has LOTS of great information. This is just one of tons of great articles. I use the site as a source of information for training our boys to be men.

I have a manual of manly wisdom for each of our boys as they go through their Man Day — their 13th birthday, when they begin basic training for manliness — and this site is the source of a lot of that information.

It’s not a “Christian” site, I don’t present all of the information to our children, and what I present to our sons often has to be edited. BUT — it’s an excellent site, what with all of its manly information.

http://artofmanliness.com/2012/02/07/the-importance-of-roughhousing-with-your-kids/

Quotes from John Taylor Gatto

John Taylor Gatto was named “New York State Teacher of the Year” in 1992. After years and years of teaching, he left because of what he learned he was teaching, what was actually going on in public schools.

 

Here’s his site: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/

 

Here are some quotes from this phenomenal teacher:

 

“Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges; it should allow you to find values which will be your road map through life; it should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever you are doing, wherever you are, whomever you are with; it should teach you what is important, how to live and how to die.”

 

“By preventing a free market in education, a handful of social engineers – backed by the industries that profit from compulsory schooling: teacher colleges, textbook publishers, materials suppliers, et al. – has ensured that most of our children will not have an education, even though they may be thoroughly schooled.”

 

“…‘How will they learn to read?’ you ask, and my answer is ‘Remember the lessons of Massachusetts.’ When children are given whole lives instead of age-graded ones in cellblocks, they learn to read, write, and do arithmetic with ease, if those things make sense in the kind of life that unfolds around them.”

“I’ve come to believe that genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us…  I began to wonder, reluctantly, whether it was possible that being in school itself was what was dumbing them down. Was it possible I had been hired not to enlarge children’s power, but to diminish it? That seemed crazy on the face of it, but slowly I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior.”